The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development

by David Mosse (Editor), David Lewis (Editor)

Overview

Today international development policy is converging around ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction. What does this mean for the local and international dimensions of aid relationships?

The Aid Effect demonstrates the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. The contributors provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official aid policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the working of power inequalities built through the standardisations of a neoliberal framework.

The contributors take on new challenges to anthropology presented by a ‘global aid architecture’ which no longer operates through discrete projects but has moved on to sector wide approaches, budgetary support and other macro-level instruments of development; but they remain faithful to the fieldwork methodology that is anthropology’s strength and the source of rare insight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783713660
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	10/20/2005
Series:	Anthropology, Culture and Society
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	528 KB

About the Author

David Mosse is Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He is author of The Rule of Water (Oxford University Press, 2003), Cultivating Development (Pluto, 2004) and The Aid Effect (Pluto, 2005).

David Lewis is Professor of Social Policy and Development in the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics. He is the author of Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society (CUP, 2012), co-author of Anthropology and Development (Pluto, 2015) and co-editor of The Aid Effect (Pluto, 2005).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF INTERNATIONAL AID

David Mosse

Today international development policy is characterised by the convergence of ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction within a framework of 'global governance'. What insights into the social processes and effects of this new consensus on aid and global governance can anthropology give? This is a good moment to ask such a question. In recent years there has been a gradual expansion of the scope of ethnography from its classical concern with 'the local' and 'the other', or the impact of global processes on local places, to more sophisticated conceptions of local-global relations. Some of these examine the way in which global capitalism has to negotiate its presence in specific settings; some explore the 'production of locality' in the context of global processes (Appadurai 1997); and yet others focus on the production of globalisation in terms of the relationships and institutions through which 'the global' is articulated (Burawoy 2001).

The aid effect is a contribution to this ethnographic trajectory. Its chapters demonstrate the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. Together they provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the workings of power inequalities and biases built through the standardisations and efficiencies of a neoliberal framework. At the same time, a 'global aid architecture' presents new challenges to the anthropology of development. How are relationships (international, state-citizen) reconfigured in the contemporary transnational aid domain? Are boundaries between nation-states, donors and self-governing international financial institutions (such as the IMF and the World Bank) blurred by the new technical demands of managing aid flows? Does the 'moral resurrection of aid' with its emphasis on ownership, participation and good governance in fact conceal an era of greater intervention by international agencies in the internal affairs of developing countries?

The contributors here do not regard 'governance' in its global form as simply a matter of 'super-state' dominance and hegemony. Rather they turn research attention to understanding how legitimacy is won for international policies, how programmes enrol participants with the rhetoric of freedom, partnership, ownership or participation; how order or control is achieved through internalised disciplines of power (Rose and Miller 1992); how (as in the past) states govern through community control (Li 2002); and how the representational practices through which state power operates (e.g. spatial metaphors of vertical encompassment which put the state 'above', people 'below') are extended, but also disrupted, within the transnational sphere (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Since the work of 'governance' is dispersed to private sector service providers, enterprises, communities, NGOs (non-governmental organisations), donors (and a host of competing, rival or parasitic transnational lobbying and financing networks, 2002: 994), it is, as Tania Li noted, 'an empirical question whether these are coordinated by state bureaucracy', or located within the framework of the nation-state at all. Attention has then to be directed to transnational systems. Focusing on those of international aid, ethnographers in this volume ask what might be the instruments (technical, procedural, legal, statistical) of an aid regime of 'rule' through mutual complicity? What (or on whom) does the order of an internationalised policy regime impose, exclude, suppress or depoliticise? Alternatively, how does it liberate, include and make accountable? In answer, the chapters of the book trace the paper trails, the protocols and practices, the rules and routines, the idioms and identities through which people become subjects of, as well as subject to, global development. Drawing attention to these dispersed procedures and instruments of governance, often autonomous from the state and national politics, some authors draw on the notion of 'governmentality' (of a transnational kind, cf. Ferguson and Gupta 2002), although, as will be clear, overall the book challenges this Foucauldian concept as an explanation for the workings of the international aid system.

This introductory chapter begins with an explanation of the new framework of international aid, its commitments and modalities. I then set out the neoliberal and institutionalist underpinnings of this framework, and examine concerns raised in the recent literature about the implications of policy convergence. Third, I ask what approach has anthropology taken, or might it take, to researching global governance. In this context I reflect, fourth, on the significance and limitations of the Foucauldian notion of 'governmentality' for an ethnographic approach to global processes. Finally, I examine some alternative conceptualisations that allow simultaneously for the contingencies and specifics of power and the reproduction of universal policy frames.

THE NEW AID FRAMEWORK: GLOBALISATION, GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND AID

Much of this book focuses on what has sometimes been characterised as a 'new architecture of aid'. To what does this refer? First, it refers to the focus of aid on policy reform rather than conventional investment projects; reform which is 'neoliberal' in the sense of promoting economic liberalisation, privatisation and market mechanisms as the instruments of growth and efficiency. Instead of funding individual projects donors collaborate (in principle) to make concessional finance available (in the short term through budgetary support) to assist governments to develop their own overall strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction (through Comprehensive Development Frameworks, sector-wide approaches [SWAPs], and the like) or finance the cost of fiscal, governance or pro-poor reforms that would make these strategies sustainable in the long run (such as privatising loss-making public sector operations, cutting civil service, decentralisation and anti-corruption measures). In some cases loans and grants are now made to states on the basis of demonstrable commitment and past performance on the reform agenda – that is aid 'selectivity' rather than 'conditionality' – and outcomes known through state-level poverty monitoring. This change in aid, Eyben (with León, this volume) suggests, can be regarded as a shift from 'gift' to 'contract'.

Second, in the new architecture, aid is framed by an international commitment to poverty reduction. In particular many donor agencies have pinned their goals to internationally agreed development targets. Among other things, this means that austere 1980s structural adjustment lending is replaced by debt-relief initiatives linked to pro-poor policy reform as part of new aid packages resulting from Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). A policy drive for poverty reduction and empowerment is thus joined onto and, under the rubric of 'making globalisation work for the poor' (DFID [Department for International Development] 2000), helps to re-legitimise continuing donor emphasis on policies of trade liberalisation, macro-economic stability and fiscal discipline overseen by the IMF, while mobilising new aid resources. Third, reform agendas go beyond economic and financial management to 'governance' more generally, including aid packages for public sector management, the support of civil society, and the promotion of consultative and participatory mechanisms for development planning. The failings of ruling regimes (including corruption within them) are no longer censored as internal matters but have become central to the concerns of external donors; although at the same time (as noted) aid relationships are reframed in the language of partnership and local ownership. These approaches to aid have brought about new levels of convergence in the agendas of major donors underpinned by greater interdependence through country-level coalitions (although important differences of approach remain – between British, Scandanavian, US or Japanese aid, bilateral and multilateral – which deserve separate comparative study).

This new aid framework has two key theoretical underpinnings: neoliberalism and institutionalism. Following the collapse of communism, international aid became underpinned conceptually by a neoliberalist confidence in market exchange, the doctrine of comparative advantage and the framing of development goals not in terms of national economic development (through the administered economy) but rather in terms of establishing the conditions for successful participation in (production for) world markets. As international markets replaced independent states as the real agents of change, the role of government was to secure the conditions for market integration, including the rule of law, secure private property, anti-corruption measures, accountable and effective government, 'economic freedom' (liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, controlled inflation, the removal of protectionism), as well as investment in education, health and communications (Burawoy 2003; Robinson 2002: 1052-53, 6). And the instruments of aid – stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes engineered and imposed by the international financial institutions (IFIs – the IMF and the World Bank) – were oriented towards assisting an internal restructuring of national economies to harmonise with the 'new legal and regulatory superstructure for the global economy' so as to allow the free movement of capital. And the 'enterprise models' applied ensured that various state functions were increasingly taken over by the market (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989).

Now, growing evidence of 'market imperfections', economic instability and the financial crises of the 1990s challenged the neoliberal vision, but did not derail the project. Instead, a second complementary body of theory was deployed to explain and manage market imperfections – the new institutional economics (NIE) (Soederberg 2004a: 284). Grounded in neoclassical models of rational choice, the NIE is concerned with institutional constraints on individual behaviour, which account for the fact that information is not perfect and that transactions have costs (Robinson 2002: 1058). Policy prescriptions can thus focus on institutions conceptualised as sets of rules structuring incentives and modelled mathematically, reshaping social behaviour so as to increase efficiency and enhance the economic behaviour of individuals (2002: 1058-59). Recent work extends institutional analysis to the relations of international aid itself, so that 'partnership' and 'local ownership' become strategies to restructure incentives and overcome the 'moral hazard' or 'principal agent' problems inherent in aid processes (Ostrom et al. 2002). In parallel, the idea of 'path dependency' allows that structures of incentives are shaped by the historical interactions of institutions (e.g. Putnam 1993; Robinson 2002: 1059). These ideas, and especially the importance of getting institutions and incentives right, underpin a re-accommodation of the role of both the state (in the rubric of 'good governance') and self-organising society (community or social capital) as complementary mechanisms for development in a 'post-Washington consensus', although the market retains its inherent powers of organisation, rational allocation, benefit optimisation and non-territorial transnational regulation (Duffield 2002: 1055; cf. Fine 1999).

The conceptual tools of the 'new institutional economics' allow a new managerialism in international development, no longer confined to project cycles, and driven by a combination of poverty target orientation and policy-based objectives. Indeed, as its ends have narrowed to the achievement of quantified targets on poverty or ill-health, the means of international aid have expanded from the management of economic growth and technology transfer to the reorganisation of state and society needed to deliver on targets (Mosse 2005a: 3-4, 237-38; Quarles van Ufford et al. 2003).

Globalisation and universal knowledge for global governance

So, international aid policy frameworks continue to endorse globalisation as a process of economic and political freedom (democracy) and poverty reduction, despite the fact that free trade seems more clearly linked to growing inequality than gains in income or welfare for the poor (Storm and Rao 2004: 571), and that the experience of sharp increase in relative deprivation and distributional conflict is only intensified by reduced state protection (Chua 2003; Storm and Rao 2004: 573-74). Despite long being questioned (Storm and Rao 2004: 571, citing Marx), the notion that there is a close positive relationship between freedom for capital and freedom for the poor carries more conviction than ever; while this view of development as a matter of free markets and democracy persistently ignores the highly interventionist course of much actual employment, welfare and poverty alleviation (Fine 2004: 586).

Those who hold the free-market faith while proposing that its failings can be addressed by further building democratic institutions for global governance (e.g. Griffin 2003) in fact face considerable academic scepticism. The view that imperfect (monopolistic, oligopolistic) markets can be dealt with by a new global architecture of law and institutions is challenged as simultaneously instrumentalist and utopian (see Development and Change 2004). Indeed critics of 'global governance' question the selective representation of 'globalisation' itself. It is a deeply problematic descriptive and analytical category having, Fine suggests, at least three critical omissions. The first is the complexity and diversity of 'globalisation', which has no singular logic. Despite this, not only economic but also social policy is internationalised through donor knowledge systems that emphasise the universal over the contextual, that is knowledge which is deductive and oriented to general predictive models or 'universal principles', and which ignores national frameworks (or construes their specifics as obstacles to be overcome) and constantly organises attention away from the contingencies of practice and the plurality of perspectives (Mosse 2004).

The second omission is the continuing importance (and economic role) of the state, especially the pursuit of US partisan interests (cf. Frank 2004: 608). Globalisation is by no means synonymous with neoliberalism, and the concept conceals the realities of power in the current international order. Correspondingly, 'global governance' inevitably involves the exercise of power over both markets and institutions (trade, knowledge, environment), which then allows economic globalisation to concentrate power and centralise decision-making (Frank 2004: 609; Storm and Rao 2004: 574). In short, 'globalisation' is a policy idea that denies the political economy of capitalism as a 'system of power and conflict' (Fine 2004: 586, 588).

The third omission is the role of speculation-driven and ungovernable international financial markets, which provoked the financial crises of the 1990s and which weaken the potential for independent macroeconomic policy anywhere (Fine 2004: 587). As Castells points out, neither international institutions, nor the US, nor corporations run the world, 'they don't even run the economy because they are dependent on an uncontrollable system, which is the global financial markets' (in Kreisler 2001; Fine 2004: 583, 590).

An ethnographic literature on 'globalisation' contributes to the exploration of a further set of three critical observations. The first is that internationalised policy is not a product of some global democratic process, but is produced by transnational epistemic communities and translated into the prescriptions of donors led by the US-influenced World Bank and the IMF. Unlike the UN, voting rights in these institutions are not one-member-one-vote. The Bank's Director of Social Development has himself expressed concern about an international institution without democratic governance trying to 'design the global social policy'. Knowledge production for global governance, as Randeria points out, erases the boundaries of national and international. Development regimes produce 'scattered sovereignties' as governments implement IFI norms, comply with credit conditionalities, execute project 'proto-law' or supranational legal regimes in such areas as patent law, tax law, industrial licensing, trade liberalisation and other forms of 'legal globalisation', which take place 'outside the arena of legislative deliberation and democratic decision making' (2003: 29, 42). Among the many other forms of transnational knowledge imposed in different national contexts, the categories, classifications and lexicons of World Bank environmental discourse are examined by Goldman to show how '[w]hat counts as biodiversity in Laos is defined by actors other than the people who live there' (2001: 207). Internationalised policy prescription, such studies suggest, derives from the independent power of global networks of expertise autonomous from government, made possible (as well as necessary) by micro-electronic based technologies and the information, communication and social networks (and labile markets) they allow (Castells 1996; Kreisler 2001). At the same time the 'networks of practice' through which the regulations of aid are executed locally involve a growing role for equally unaccountable non-state private actors and contractors evading global democratic processes (Duffield 2002: 1063).

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Aid Effect"
by .
Copyright © 2005 David Mosse and David Lewis.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Ethnography of Donors and Neoliberal Policy by David Mosse
2. An Ethnography of ‘Loan Arrangements’ between the Bretton Woods Institutions and the Government of Malawi: Good Governance as Technology by Gerhard Anders
3. Timing, Scale and Style: Capacity as Governmentality in Tanzania by Jeremy Gould
4. The Reinvention of Ownership at the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation by Monique Nuijten and Jilles van Gastel
5. Who Owns the Gift? Donor-Recipient Relations and the National Elections in Bolivia by Rosalind Eyben and Rosario Leon
6. Interconnected and Interinfected: DOTS and the Stabilisation of the Tuberculosis Control Programme in Nepal by Ian Harper
7. The Worshippers of Rules: Defining the Right and Wrong in Local Project Applications in Estonia by Aet Annist
8. Unstating ‘the Public’: An Ethnography of Reform in an Urban Public Sector Utility in South India by Karen Coelho
9. The Disjuncture of Things: Some Remarks About a New Agenda for Studying Development by Philip Quarles van Ufford